


The Journey North

by Sheeana



Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-03
Updated: 2014-05-03
Packaged: 2018-01-21 20:02:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1562291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sheeana/pseuds/Sheeana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Years after the end of her adventures, Lyra travels north again with her new friends.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Journey North

**Author's Note:**

  * For [xenoamorist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/xenoamorist/gifts).



"You're lying. None of that can possibly be true. There can't be other worlds," said Violet, in a tone that made it evident that she didn't believe for a second that Lyra was lying about any of it.

"No, she en't," insisted Billy Costa. "She en't lying. The Gobblers took me, and I saw Bolvangar, and what they did to the daemons, and the bear, and everything."

"What about the other worlds? Did you see them?"

"No, but if Lyra en't lying about Bolvangar, then she en't lying about the other worlds."

"If it's all true, aren't you afraid, going back there?" Violet asked. Her cat daemon ceased his circling around her legs and sat down at her feet, his back straight and his ears pointed straight up as if listening intently for Billy's response.

"Nah. Lyra and the bears'll protect us, and that's all done for years now."

If she weren't so busy adjusting the straps on her luggage and making the final checks for their journey north, Lyra might have chimed in. She might have launched into another daring tale of adventure and bravery and loss, and Violet might have said she believed her, this time, but Lyra's mind was somewhere distant, in another place and another time. She checked the alethiometer in its pouch one last time before she swung her bag over her shoulder. It was habit, learned when she was still a stubborn, lying child at the very beginnings of understanding, and carried on over the years since.

"I'll believe it when I see it," Violet said, shaking her head, her short, dark curls bobbing at her chin. She was slender, and shorter than Lyra had finally grown to be in the end, but she was sharper than any of the old scholars at Oxford and she never let anyone tell her no. Lyra had always thought she was worthy of being their second female student, ever since she had overheard her telling the Master that she refused to go home to her family until she was a full-fledged scholar. It had still taken some time to come to see her as a friend.

"You'll see it when we get there," said Lyra, finally joining their conversation as she finished with her preparations. She couldn't tell Violet that she had _never_ lied; that would be a lie of such magnitude that even Lyra would never have tried to make it believable, not even when she was spinning the most fantastic lies that had ever been told.

They boarded the ship together in the early hours of the morning, when the sun was still only barely peeking over the distant horizon on the ocean. Billy was humming a cheerful tune, and Lyra's spirits lifted with it. The wind picked up around them, carrying the promise of new sights and sounds and places along with the familiar ones Lyra yearned to revisit. As the ship departed, she watched the city disappearing behind them, and then only the open sea lay ahead.

\---

The first days on the ship seemed unending and utterly uninspiring - nothing like the beginning of the sort of grand adventure Lyra longed for. The sun was bright and warm. She found herself wishing for snow, and Pantalaimon spend his time circling her feet rather than draped across her neck.

Unsurprisingly, Billy seemed more at home on the water than on land; Violet needed longer to find her sea legs, but she was as determined as Lyra had once been to accustom herself to traveling. To pass the time, they counted and arranged their instruments and materials together, preparing for their four-month journey through the Arctic. Each instrument served a different purpose, and it had taken them many months to assemble them all.

The air grew colder as the ship traveled north, and Lyra's breath came easier. It puffed out into warm clouds of steam whenever she exhaled. Sometimes she and Pantalaimon made a game of it, each trying to outdo the other until they were breathless and panting and laughing.

At night, when the only sound to break her concentration in her tiny cabin was the creaking of the wood as the ship swayed in the waves, Lyra read some of the monographs she'd brought with her and took notes. Pantalaimon perched on her shoulder, following along. Occasionally he made a disapproving sound, but she hushed him and continued without looking up. 

One morning, they woke to a great screeching sound – the crash of ice against ice on the open ocean. Lyra and her friends hurried into their warm clothes and rushed to the deck to behold the spectacle. Ice floes bobbed past the ship, borne away on great waves to the vast unknown expanse of the sea. At first Violet's eyes went wide every time one of them approached to the ship, and her hand clutched at the railing as if the ship itself might suddenly decide to throw them overboard, but their captain was a skilled sailor, and the ice floes never came too close. Lyra, unafraid, only laughed. The next morning, when it happened again, Violet joined her.

"She's not scared. Just like you were, when we were younger," said Pantalaimon softly into Lyra's ear, as he curled around her neck like a warm scarf. He was unfazed by the ice, or the waves, or anything else that didn't bother Lyra.

"I never knew what we were doing then, Pan," Lyra murmured, accepting his affectionate nuzzle against her cheek.

"That's why you need me," he said, but it was nothing more than another affectionate gesture. They both knew that he had never known anymore than she had.

In the afternoons, and sometimes in the early mornings before the sun rose, Lyra and Violet took measurements of the weather using special balloons they released into the wind. They lowered ropes into the water to check the temperature and currents of the sea. When they had the readings they noted them down, and then spent hours poring over the information, arranging it into charts and interpreting it in their notebooks. While they worked on their research, Billy sat on the edge of the ship's deck and watched, his feet dangling, his heron daemon leaning casually against his shoulder. He had been Lyra's true friend since the summer after she returned to Oxford, but he was still only starting to learn how to work some of her research instruments.

Sometimes Lyra lay on the deck alone at night. The thin layer of saltwater that clung to the wood seeped slowly into her outer furs, and she watched the stars. Almost unconsciously, she took out her alethiometer and her fingers traced around its edges, learning and relearning the shapes, committing them to memory only for them to slip away from her grasp before she could make any sense of them. 

There were days when she longed for her childhood, and days when she was terribly glad it was over. There were moments when the soft light of the stars was too much to take in, and she wished so hard for something she could never have. There were worlds out there where people saw the same stars she could see, and worlds where people saw different stars stretched out in patterns across the sky, but she was stuck in this world. She would never leave it again.

One night near the end of their journey, Billy's shouting woke them from their swaying beds. They rushed out onto the deck to observe tiny black shapes swirling above them, far up in the sky, beneath the sparse clouds and the bright white light of the moon. Billy's eyes were nearly as wide as his mouth.

"Witches," said Lyra, laughing in delight and recognition. "They're witches."

"Told you we en't liars," Billy muttered after he had overcome his initial awe, nudging Violet with his elbow, but Violet was caught up in the majesty and glory of the figures soaring high under the moonlight. If she noticed Billy goading her, she didn't reply. 

The three friends stood on the deck with the crew of the ship and watched until the witches disappeared into the clouds without ever flying low enough to clearly make them out. Long after the sky was empty again and she had returned to bed, Lyra lay still and wondered about Serafina Pekkala, if she ever thought of Lyra as Lyra sometimes thought of her, if they would ever meet again.

Finally, after what seemed like an age spent on the decks of the ship, traversing an endless sea with only icebergs and pods of whales for company, one morning the sun dawned bright on a clear day over a desolate beach on a frozen island. An envoy of great armored bears waited there to escort them to the court of Iorek Byrnison. 

Lyra stood on the ground, and the pebbles of the beach crunched beneath her boots, and she felt that she had come home at last.

\---

"Lyra Silvertongue," came the deep rumble of Iorek Byrnison's voice as Lyra walked unafraid into his court, her held held high, and he bowed his head in greeting to her. "You and your friends are welcome in Svalbard."

Solemnly, because these things were meant to be done in solemn silence, Lyra placed her hands on either side of his jaw, and bowed her head down until her temple touched his nose. His warm breath blew against her cheeks. She hid her smile, kept her face straight and expressionless until the customs had been observed and they could speak as friends.

Iorek Byrnison led them into a room with four walls and a ceiling made of blocks of ice. On the floor, a meal was laid out on the snow, an extravagant Arctic feast for the king of the bears and his guests. Lyra sat on the frozen ground, with Billy at one side and Violet at the other, politely waiting for Iorek Byrnison to join them before they began.

"Aren't we going to cook it?" whispered Violet close to Lyra's ear, in a tone of barely-disguised shock. Her daemon was sitting at her side, peering down at their meal with the same sort of perplexed disbelief. When Violet tried it, though, she saw that it wasn't so bad. 

"I think it's good," Billy said cheerfully. "I en't had seal before. My family brought me right back south after Lyra and them came and got me."

"I liked it since I was little," Lyra said, laughing. Years in the south would never deprive her of her taste for Arctic fare, and she enjoyed what the bears provided as much now as she had when she was only a child.

"Before we leave, I'd like to ask our hosts about weather phenomena on the island, if you don't mind," Violet said to Lyra, while they ate. "They might have information we can't get anywhere else. It's not every day someone gets invited to Svalbard."

"Iorek Byrnison said we can stay here as his guests. You can ask them whatever you want to," Lyra replied. 

After they had sated their appetites, she rose from her place and followed Iorek Byrnison out under the stars. She left Violet and Billy to question the bears, her with her instruments in hand and Billy with nothing but his curiosity.

\---

For awhile, they said nothing. Iorek Byrnison padded through the snow, and Lyra followed after, leaving smaller footprints beside his. They came to a stop at the edge of a small ridge overlooking an endless plain of snow and ice and rock.

"What will you do, when your research ends?" he asked her, after they had stood in silence for a moment.

"I don't know."

"Can you read your alethiometer? What does it tell you?"

"Not yet. I'm learning. It's like learning to talk, see, there's so many little sounds and things you have to know before you can say anything at all. And it's easy when you don't know you're doing it, but when you forget how to talk, learning it all over again is hard."

"And when you do?"

"That's too far from now," Lyra replied cryptically, but there was a smile tugging at the corners of her lips as she turned to look up at him. Iorek Byrnison watched her wordlessly for a moment, and then inclined his great head once. With his approval, Lyra was satisfied. As if echoing her thoughts, Pantalaimon relaxed around her neck, draping himself more easily across her shoulders.

Lyra leaned against Iorek Byrnison's thick fur and iron-clad shoulder and watched the stars, thinking of all that had transpired for her to be standing in that place at that moment. The silence that followed between them was a comfortable one, the kind that old friends enjoyed when there was nothing more left to be said. 

\---

On their last day in Svalbard, Lyra and her friends were given iron trinkets worked from raw Arctic ore and shaped in the forges of Svalbard, and enough dried seal meat to last them at least the better part of their travels. Lyra bid farewell to Iorek Byrnison with a touch of her forehead to his nose, and a heartfelt promise to return in the following spring when the ice-blocked northern passages melted again. With Pantalaimon perched on her shoulder and a renewed lightness in her heart, she boarded the ship bound for the Baltic with Violet and Billy, eager to continue her research in Lettony and Muscovy. 

As the ship eased into the waves, her fingers passed over the alethiometer in its satchel on her hip, assuring herself that it was safe. It was never enough for her to be content with what she had. She thirsted for the certainty she had lost when she left behind her childhood, but she was learning that patience could be just as valuable as eagerness. One day she would learn to read the alethiometer properly again, and then she would know where she was going; for now she could only rely on herself, and Pantalaimon, and her friends.


End file.
